There seem to me to be (certainly more than, but at least) two different approaches to the problem of White Supremacy in contemporary America. The first understands the problem to lie in the class structure of American society. The class system is a White Supremacist system, but with some racial permeability, allowing some darker-skinned holders of economic power to have “a place at the table” of the White movers and shakers of America, even if a lower place than they’d have had, were they ethnically paler. There are various responses to this way of looking at things, but the class structure itself may be regarded as the main problem here, a problem to be addressed by subverting that structure, e.g., by distributing wealth and reducing exclusivism. Here the allies of the racially marginalized are poor people and MLK’s “Poor People Campaign” may be named as a version of it. The other approach is fine with America’s class structure, but wants it to be de-racialized, in order to make plain the way for all, regardless of race, to great wealth and power in America. Here the allies of the racially marginalized are liberal entrepreneurs and big-hearted inheritors of privilege. Hillary Clinton exemplifies this view.
Of course, there are Kantian responses to White Supremacy, ones that set out to change the “hearts” of racists, but a fair mind does very little to address deeply ingrained structures of exclusion and violence, as the example of the Christian milk-drinkers at the cocktail parties of great corporations has well demonstrated.
I don’t think the way forward is through Kantian conservatism or Hegelian progressivism. I rather think that it is America’s racialized class system itself that is to be undermined. I don’t propose making that a personal mission, either for me or for you, but I do think that it is a project that little local churches would do well to undertake, locally, among their congregations, not just in the hearts of individual church members.